Sebastian Mallaby - The Worlds Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations

A sophisticated, evenhanded take on the banks last decade of development efforts.... Illuminating... Heartbreaking... [Mallaby] has produced a book chock-full of affecting vignettes, and that rarest of treatsan informed disquisition about public policy wrapped up in a fascinating narrative.

The New York Times

The Worlds Banker sets out to be a biography of Mr. Wolfensohn, but it is really as much about the rich worlds relations with the poor. Mr. Mallaby writes about this vast topic with vigor and wit, and in a tone so reasonable it makes you want to slap the people who scale office blocks to unfurl banners proclaiming that the World Bank Approves Chinas Genocide in Tibet.... Mr. Wolfensohn comes across as filled with a roaring restless hunger to do all the things that man can do, and to succeed at all of them. On the negative side, he is so vain that he prefers to shout at his subordinates than share credit with them. He probably wont like this book. But anyone else who cares about development will.

The Economist

Sebastian Mallabys fascinating book on the World Bank is both timely and an excellent read.... [Mallaby] has a talent for brilliant writing and penetrating analysis.... He brings to the book... an ability to tell his tale engagingly and with copious amount of the kind of inside gossip that enlivens the pages of his newspaper.... Whoever succeeds Mr. Wolfensohn needs to read this masterly book.

Jagdish Bhagwati, Financial Times

A fascinating, lively account of a man and an institution grappling with the mammoth challenges of poverty, development, and global politics. Sebastian Mallabys finely etched tale is both troubling and inspirational.

Robert Kagan

Sebastian Mallaby, one of the most clear-eyed writers of his generation, has done something brilliant with The Worlds Banker. In a book that grips the reader to the last page, he has used the oversized character of World Bank president Jim Wolfensohn to provide a piercing look at world poverty and the Wests ceaseless and sometimes contradictory experiments in fighting it.

David Marannis

Sebastian Mallaby has done the impossible. Hes written a book about global poverty that is an utterly compelling read. Mallaby uses the larger-than-life figure of James Wolfensohn and his presidency of the World Bank to tell the tale. Theres intrigue, gossip, color, and humor all mixed in with high intelligence. But throughout there is also a deeply felt desire to do something for the worlds three billion people who live on less than two dollars a day. In writing this wonderful book, Mallaby has helped shine a light on what should be the great struggle of our times.

Fareed Zakaria

This readable book is much more than a portrait of a contradictory and complex character. It also offers a provocative account of Wolfensohns two five-year terms... that bookmark an intense period of change in the World Banks sixty-year history.... The Worlds Banker is an engrossing story. At its heart is a fascinating character and a lively retelling of the tortured history of an important institution that almost no one understands.

BusinessWeek

The Worlds Banker is a riveting portrait of the World Bank and its mercurial president of the past ten years, James Wolfensohn.... Mallabys book may well be the most hilarious depiction of a big organization and its controversial boss since Michael Lewiss Liars Poker.

Rahul Jacob, Financial Times Weekend Magazine

With a bright, breezy... and assured style that reflects his years at The Economist, the author takes the complex and (lets admit it) potentially excruciating topic of the World Bank and makes it accessible to the general reader.... It is to Mr. Mallabys credit that his readers, like the developing countries the World Bank was designed to assist, will be left asking for more.

The New York Sun

I wonder if Sebastian Mallaby had Stevenson[s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde] in the back of his mind when he was writing this book, for the World Bank President James Wolfensohn he portrays here appears to be almost exactly 50 percent Jekyll and 50 percent Hyde. Wolfensohn/Jekyll is the irresistible charmer seen at his vacation home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, who can turn bitter foes into best friends (or at least frenemies) with a single shot of his charisma. Wolfensohn/Hyde is the intolerable monster seen on Wall Street and in Washington, whose egocentric tantrums have just the opposite effect. The moral of Mallabys story is that Wolfensohns presidency of the World Bank would have been more successful had Dr. Jekyll been in sole charge. But that may underestimate the usefulness of Mr. Hyde.... Wolfensohns career is an astonishing story in its own right, and Mallaby, an accomplished British journalist who is now a Washington Post editorial writer, tells it well.

Niall Ferguson, The Washington Post Book World

A well-researched piece of reportage... The Worlds Banker is a dishy account of the intramural struggles of Wolfensohn and the other demigods of global development upon whose efforts the fate of millions may depend.

San Francisco Chronicle

What the author accomplishes in The Worlds Banker is extraordinary: Mallaby has transformed the recent history of the World Bank into a page turner.

Richard Adams, The Guardian

A swiftly moving tale of what goes on behind the vaults at the World Bank, an institution led by a vigorous, cantankerous and polarizing boss.... Mallaby takes a breezy, human-interest approach to all of this, as seems fitting with such a larger-than-life outsized character pitted against outsized problems. But what is best about this very good work is not its high-flying characters, well handled though they are, but its enthusiastic effort to personify the World Bank.... A worthy essay in institutional dynamics as much as financial history and international development.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

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THE WORLDS BANKER

Sebastian Mallaby has been a Washington Post columnist since 1999. From 1986 to 1999, he was on the staff of The Economist, serving in Zimbabwe, London, and Japan, as well as serving as the magazines Washington bureau chief. He spent 2003 as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and has written for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and The New Republic, among others. He was born in England and educated at Oxford, and now lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and children.

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